National Network for Equitable Library Service

"Immensely haunting... The first of many great things about Martyna Majok's Cost of Living... is the way it slams the door on uplifting stereotypes... Ms. Majok has engineered her plot to lead naturally to moments of intense and complicated pungency... If you don't find yourself in someone in Cost of Living, you're not looking." — Jesse Green, New York Times.

Cyrano is the most interesting person in any room – a wordsmith, a charmer. She works twice as hard and runs twice as fast as the pretty boys, because she's deeply ashamed of something about herself. Enter Roxanne: brilliant and beautiful, with a penchant for poetry and a way with words, just like Cyrano. But Roxanne only has eyes for Yan: hot, manly Yan, who is dumbstruck around Roxanne. (Probably shy, right?) Until suddenly he starts saying the most amazing things. But it's not Yan writing these perfect love scenes, it's Cyrano...

Very loosely based on the life of a French duelist and playwright, Cyrano de Bergerac is a play in verse that tells the tale of a soldier who is gifted with every imaginable positive attribute—except that of a handsome appearance. Because of his perceived ugliness (including a disproportionately large nose), Cyrano feels unworthy of the woman he loves and vents his emotions via other—sometimes amusing, sometimes tragic—channels.

"Daphne's Dive is the kind of place 'where everybody knows your name.'... Ms. Hudes has a supple feel for characterization and a wide-ranging sympathy for life's waifs and strays. And like the characters on Cheers, the regulars at Daphne's make up an informal family with whose triumphs and troubles we come to sympathize." — New York Times. "A slow-burning, vibrantly sketched portrait of a scruffy North Philly booze joint run by love-scarred Daphne...

"Satire is her oxygen... In her new oddball comedy, Dead Man's Cell Phone, Sarah Ruhl is forever vital in her lyrical and biting takes on how we behave." — The Washington Post. "Ruhl's zany probe of the razor-thin line between life and death delivers a fresh and humorous look at the times we live in." — Variety. "Sarah Ruhl is deliriously imaginative and fearless in her choice of subject matter. She is an original." — Molly Smith, artistic director, Arena Stage. An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet café.

Dead White Writer on the Floor uses two literary conventions—theatre of the absurd and mystery novels—to create one of the funniest and thought-provoking plays ever about identity politics. In Act One, six "savages"—noble, innocent, ignorant, fearless, wise, and gay, respectively—find themselves in a locked room with the body of a white writer, which they stash in a closet. None of them can figure out how he died or which of them might have killed him.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman's deferred American dream. Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial.

Ira Levin's Broadway triumph Deathtrap melds gasp-out-loud thrills with laugh-out-loud laughs in a murderously entertaining "who'll-do-it" of a play, within a play, within a... Once-successful Sidney Bruhl has only a string of recent flops to his credit when he's sent an instant hit of a thriller written by a former student. Is Sidney desperate enough to kill in order to claim the work as his own?

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Over the past decade, Donald Margulies has written some of the most insightful works in contemporary American drama. His body of work includes The Loman Family Picnic, Sight Unseen, The Model Apartment, and Collected Stories, and with each succeeding work, his audiences have grown. It is no surprise that his newest work is his most critically successful yet. As with all of Margulies's work, he is a master of observing what might be considered the ordinary moments of life and its foibles with fresh ears.

Considered by critics to be one of the best tragedies of the English Renaissance, The Changeling was written by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley and first published in book form in 1653. Beatrice-Joanna is betrothed to Alonzo but in love with Alsemero. She convinces De Flores, who is in love with her, to help her be free of Alonzo—by murdering him. In a comic subplot, Alibius' young wife Isabella has two admirers, Franciscus and Antonio, who pretend to be madmen in order to see her.